Thought Leader Q&A: Why Psychologists Need to Become Communicators

Note: This blog post features a speaker from APA 2019. This speaker will not be featured at APA 2023. 

As anyone with a computer or smartphone knows, the internet is brimming with misinformation. And it goes well beyond partisan politics or the latest dietary fad—the erroneous and downright false articles on mental and behavioral health are multiplying every day. That’s why it’s essential for psychologists and other health-care professionals to more actively shape the public discourse on mental health, says James Hamblin, MD, MPH, a staff writer at The Atlantic and a lecturer at Yale School of Public Health.

“The information landscape has changed and there is an emerging appreciation among doctors and other health professionals that communication is important,” says Hamblin, who will lead a presentation at APA 2019 on “Social Media and Internet Writing as a Doctor.”

We asked Hamblin to preview some of his presentation insights.

You have said that public trust in science is at a recent historic low. What’s happening?
The democratization of information has generally been a great thing for medical professionals and for patients—but at the same time, it has allowed for the decline of faith in institutions and experts in ways that are also detrimental. For example, conspiracy theories thrive on the internet and misinformation can be spread very easily. And there are specific campaigns to spread misinformation by powerful people in ways that are unprecedented.

The scientific community needs to think of new ways to communicate with people—that means moving beyond the one-on-one interactions we are used to. For so long, we have had a monopoly on providing health care through a system that was entirely based on face-to-face interaction. This was information that you just couldn’t get [unless you went to] the universities that physically possessed the books and the teachers who had the information. That has all changed. Whether or not you [want] to be involved in shaping the new information landscape, it is going to happen, with or without you.

If doctors and other health professionals aren’t in the places where people are spending so much of their days, we will fade from a position of authority and be replaced by whatever information is already in those places.

Can you give an example of this misinformation as it relates to mental health?
One is gun violence. There are people who have ties to the industry or political motives who will try to say that every shooting is due to a mental illness. That has downstream effects, both in stigmatizing diseases and on people who are actually suffering and would never hurt anyone. We need people who understand the multifactorial causes of violence in societies to be part of the discourse, and not to just let the conversation be that mental illness is the thing that is linked with violence.

So, do we all need to become proficient at using social media, like Facebook Live and Twitter?
Not at all. I’m not saying anyone needs to use one specific platform. The nice thing is there are so many platforms and communication opportunities that it can mean doing almost anything. Write an op-ed, send a tweet, post an Instagram or Snapchat story, or even make an audio recording or draw a sketch.

It’s important to find your niche. Everyone has their strengths, and you find whatever platforms work best for you and feels the most natural.

What’s at risk by not getting more involved in mental health communication?
We risk losing the authority of medical professionals. For a long time, the only form of publication that’s been incentivized in professional circles is publishing papers written in unreadable language that we’ve put behind paywalls. That is an outdated way of thinking, yet it is still the central premise for advancement in academic communities.

But if we just speak to ourselves, we get lost in this echo chamber where we are only reaching people who have always trusted the medical system. Meanwhile, more and more people are getting their information from whatever they can find online and whoever says they are an expert. Websites like Goop are speaking to millions of people—and that’s a missed opportunity for someone who could have been making a really valuable point about what people are doing for their health. Instead people are getting tips from those who don’t have the same training that doctors do. It’s a general shift in the understanding of the importance of keeping up the conversation.

Interviewed by Alyssa Shaffer

Lightly edited for clarity